I don't think any professional class could be described as a commodity. In any job where people have to use their intelligence, experience and wits to effect a

I don't think any professional class could be described as a commodity. In any job where people have to use their intelligence, experience and wits to effect an outcome, you will get widely differing results based on the individual. But inasmuch as any professional could be described as a commodity, I think "programmer" is particularly fraught along two axes. The first axis is discipline: the differences between web, GUI, OS, embedded, distributed, and other programming disciplines is enormous. In order to be anything approaching a commodity you would have to choose such a narrow slice of expertise that there would hardly be enough experts in that particular thing to call it a commodity. The second axis is domain: the primary job of a commercial programmer is to translate some business logic into executable code. A good programmer with decent communication skills ought to be able to do a passable job at a new domain (assuming a competent domain expert to help work out the requirements!), but the value of really understanding the domain will magnify the value not just the mythical 5x or 10x, but potentially 100x or 1000x by identifying underlying truths and patterns that a "commodity" programmer would not necessarily discover until years of experience made them a domain expert.